April 29,2022
Hello ,
Rosemarie Lengsfeld heard the cries of her younger sister as she walked away. Knowing she might never see her family again; she boarded the ship that would carry her across the sea.
But a few faint memories of New York City and the desire for freedom instilled by her Papa gave this young girl the courage to leave her beloved family and claim her American citizenship.
That story coming up, but first a few housekeeping items:
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And now for the story of an American girl and her family trapped in Germany as Adolf Hitler rose to power.
Trapped in Hitler's Stranglehold
Herman and Hilde Lengsfeld left their hometown of Breslau, Germany for a better life in America, settling in New York City. In 1930, they had a baby girl they named Rosemarie. According to Hilde, even a young child, Rosemarie had been curious and possessed a very strong
will.
Hilde, Herman and Rosemarie Lengsfeld, circa 1935. Photo courtesy of the family.
When she was four years old, Rosemarie and her family took an ocean liner to visit family back in Germany. It was a lot of excitement the little girl would
never forget.
They were welcomed with a big party, music she had never heard and platters of food she had never tasted. "My grandfather got out of his wheelchair to life me high in the air I was so happy."
Her grandfather suffered heart disease and as his condition worsened, Herman and Hilde lingered in the town of Breslau, enjoying their time with relatives. When the patriarch died, they packed up to return home to America.
With tickets in hand, the Lengsfelds, now including Rosemarie's new baby sister Eleanor, arrived at the docks to embark. Barred from boarding their ship, the family learned that Germany's president, chancellor, and leader of the Nazi party Adolf Hitler had restricted all Germans from leaving the country.
Although Papa and Mutti saw themselves as American’s, they were still German citizens. Hitler put a stranglehold on German. My parents continued to assure me the borders would be opened soon. They were wrong. Weeks passed, then months, a year and then two when the war began all talk of
going home ended.
By age six, she was nicknamed Rosel, speaking German and going to school with the neighborhood children, where she gained a bit of schoolyard celebrity for being American.
Breslau, Germany, 1937, Swastikas at Gartenstrasse (today's Piłsudskiego Street)
Courtesy Wyborcza.pl archive
Conditions only worsened as Germany took over Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland and the Lengsfelds were trapped as World War II barreled on.
Nazi Party had strong support in Breslau and became the headquarters of the southern district of the Selbstschutz, a paramilitary organization charged with helping exterminate Polish people. Hitler's administrations set up a web of concentrations camps in the surrounding region.
"Hitler’s informants were everywhere," remembered Rosemarie. "People were disappearing. Papa now said we now had to had to conceal my American identity. I feared it would be only a matter of time before the Nazi secret police found us.
Breslau was not close to the fighting for most of the war, and refugees flocked to the city more than doubling the population to some one million people. Most civilians were evacuated or fled Breslau in 1945 as the Soviet Army closed in.
Rosel and her family secretly cheered the Allied Forces and hoped for the day Germany would be defeated. In Berlin in 1945, their great joy at being liberated by the Americans was fraught with anxiety when they reported to the US embassy in hopes of getting passage to America.
Now fifteen, thin, undernourished, and traumatized by war, Rosel and her family walked to the American Embassy carrying suitcases filled with the little they owned. Rosel showed her American birth certificate. A vice-counsel officer approved her passage to New York City with other displaced persons and war
refugees.
No. Papa, Mutti and her little sister Eleonore could not go.
“Please, Rosal, please. Take me with you! Bitte, Rosal, bitte!” Eleonore’s please ripped a whole through my heart. My legs wobbled.... My sister Eleonore pleaded desperately, unable to catch her breath between sobs. I couldn’t bear to turn my head toward
her.”
The American officer wrote "Rosemary" Lengsfeld on her passport and directed Rosel. "Please follow the signs… the passage across the Atlantic will take ten days.”
Her sister’s sobbing behind her grew louder. She could hear her mother trying to calm the girl. “Taking a deep breath, I pushed down the jagged edges of my hurt…I thought of looking back at my family one last time to say goodbye, but I couldn’t do it."
Arriving in the United States as a teenager, with the help of an aunt she had never known,
Rosemary found work as an au pair, later directed Montessori school, married and became a grandmother and great-grandmother.
But for seven decades, Rosemary and her family never spoke of the wartime years. At age 85, she began "a wild, enlightening, gut-wrenching, and unexpected journey into my family’s past.
Rosemary Lengsfeld Turke, Photograph by Garrett Turke
It was a European visit in 2012 with a friend that tapped into those long ago memories. It included a stop in her parents' childhood home in Breslau, which is now Wroclaw, Poland.
Burned out vestiges of the war were still strewn about the countryside. Machinery, vehicles, discarded weaponry, and abandoned buildings had been left as haunting reminders, frozen in time. In Auschwitz, the bizarre and sadistic inventions of murder
and genocide that had left over one million dead were still covered with grime and soot. It was not that long ago.
Ruins of Breslau in May 1945 (public domain).
Rosemary shared photographs of her travels in Germany with her mother, who now also lived in America.
"My mother, silent about the war for her entire life, started talking, spurred on by the stories of my trip. Little by little, her memories began to unlock from the mental boxes that had held them in check, unable to be contained any longer."
Rosemary decided the two of them could vanquish the demons of the past together and promised she would support her mother as they recalled and recorded their memories. With the help of her son, her story is now
published in the book American Shoes: A Refugee's Story.
"The ghosts of history are always with us, we should and must respect and learn from the lessons of the past lest we fall prey to hatred and conflict all over again and block our own path to compassion and evolutionary growth."
I whole-heartedly agree!
Sources
https://americanshoesbook.com/on-the-writing-of-american-shoes/
https://youtu.be/naKODUUHXSI?list=TLGG0vU_rfq-gwcyODA0MjAyMg
https://youtu.be/E4JyLV1dTIE?list=TLGG0vU_rfq-gwcyODA0MjAyMg
https://youtu.be/GyOPKVu7QH0?list=TLGG0vU_rfq-gwcyODA0MjAyMg
American Shoes: A Refugee's Story, Beyond Words (February 2022) Rosemarie Lengsfeld Turke, Garrett Turke
American Shoes: A Refugee's Story Co-authored by Rosemarie and her son, Garrett Turke, portrays the breakdown of a society from a child’s point of view, deep inside a land where millions of law-abiding citizens were targeted as threats, and then removed for
extermination.
In other news this week, yet another subscriber of this newsletter, Bree Barton is celebrating a new book. Zia Erases the World came out this week! Congratulations, Bree Barton!
From the publisher:
Zia remembers the exact night the Shadoom arrived. One moment she was laughing with her best friends, and the next a dark room of shadows had crept into her chest. Zia has always loved words, but she can’t find a real one for the fear growing inside her. How can you defeat something if you don’t know its name?
After Zia’s mom announces that her grouchy Greek yiayia is moving into their tiny apartment, the Shadoom seems here to stay. Until Zia discovers an old family heirloom: the C. Scuro Dictionary, 13th Edition.
This is no ordinary dictionary. Hidden within its magical pages is a mysterious blue eraser shaped like an evil eye. When Zia starts to erase words that remind her of the Shadoom, they disappear one by one from the world around her. She finally has the confidence to befriend Alice, the new girl in sixth grade, and to perform at the Story Jamboree. But things quickly dissolve into chaos, as the words she erases turn out to be more vital than Zia knew.
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